How a trip to Cork at a difficult time inspired Caroline O'Donoghue's latest novel
Caroline O'Donoghue
Some years ago, when I hadn’t been living out of Ireland for very long, I was sent an online article titled “23 WAYS TO TELL THAT YOU’RE PURE CORK BAI”.
The list was obviously hastily compiled, and had all the usual suspects on it: “You’re weak for a can of Tanora”, “you never question the wisdom of Roy Keane”, “you remember exactly where you were when we beat Kerry in the Munster final”. It said that Cork people were always talking about being from Cork, that Cork people thought Cork was the best city in the world, and that the best way to spot a Cork person was to just listen and wait for the ‘I’m from Caark’.
I don’t think the list was meant to give me an existential crisis. I think it was meant to be a bit of a laugh. But as I hit each item on the list, I realised that I didn’t care about what Cork people were meant to care about, and that maybe I wasn’t properly from Cork after all.
The gulf widened the longer I lived abroad. The look of Cork changed so rapidly during the recession. Patrick’s Street, where I had spent every Saturday of my adolescence walking up and down, began to look like a mouth missing teeth. Little shops that had been there years were suddenly boarded up and replaced by pop-up businesses for phone covers and the extremely confusing ‘Wacky Hat Shop’.
The Savoy became a crater. Virgin became Zavvi which became Dealz. Further afield, on Washington Street, the places I thought of as deeply cool started to shut: Plugd records, the Kino, a cafe whose name I can’t remember but that we loved, because it had covered outdoor seating and was off the street, so we could smoke in our school uniforms.
It’s not unusual to come back to your hometown and find it changed. It’s not unusual to feel a little grumpy about it. But what was much harder to take was the fact that it had changed, and it was sad. Everyone was broke. I remember browsing in TK Maxx one day when I was home, and heard two women behind me, clicking the hangers and talking about who was now poor.
I stood and listened. “What are they doing that for? Sure they haven’t a bob.” “They don’t have two pennies to rub together.” “And they’re after selling the house.” “That house? They would have got a million for it five years ago — I’d say they won’t get half that now.” These problems were all over the country, of course, but I wasn’t visiting all over the country.
I was visiting home. As more friends emigrated, there became fewer people to come home and see. Eventually, I was coming home a few times a year, and when I did, I stuck to my parents’ house, my sister’s house, and the Dunnes in Douglas. I was not one of those Cork people who was always talking about how they’re from Cork. When English friends asked me whether Cork City was worth visiting, I shrugged, and said “probably not”.
It sounds unpatriotic. It was, nonetheless, true.
But then something happened. Cork changed, the way Cork always does, and I started noticing new cafes, new venues, and old faces. People I had grown up with who had moved away were coming back to start their own businesses. I bought a skirt in a vintage shop, and was handed a map to the many hidden vintage shops that were popping up all over the city.
Some old friends asked me to take part in their arts festival, Quarter Block Party, which involved me standing on stage with six nude men reading poetry. The same day, I attended a free talk on trans history in the empty shopfront next to Mad on North Main Street, everyone on beanbags with free bowls of curry. The day after, I was at The Roundy, and saw Junior Brother — who now regularly blows up RTÉ radio and performs all over the country — play an acoustic set. A slightly DIY, 70s aesthetic seemed to breeze through Cork city, offset by genuinely great restaurants and the best Old Fashioned cocktails you’ll ever have at The River Lee Hotel.
I sound like I’m writing a brochure. I know. But I began to fall in love with Cork again, in a very real way. It was wooing me.
Some time after that, family trouble brought me home. Our unit of six was hit by the big bad wolf of sickness. We all came back to wait for test results, scans, treatments, and the answer. I stayed for two and a half weeks. There was a lot of waiting around, and not a lot of ways to be useful. We were living in that first stage of illness, where the sick person does not yet feel very sick, but must live with the devastating facts of their body turning on them. I spent a lot of time in my childhood bedroom, or simply walking around Cork City.
I was not having a good year. This terrible thing that had happened to my family should have given me perspective on my own problems, but they only brought them into sharper focus. I was broke. I had lost two jobs in three months: the first, my regular gig at The Pool, a women’s website that suddenly folded in 2019, owing its contributors — including me — thousands of pounds. The second, my weekly column at The Times of Ireland, who had decided to downsize their office considerably. My first book, Promising Young Women, had only been out a year, and hadn’t even begun to make any money. My second book had not been released yet. The freelance journalism market, which had never been easy, was about to become considerably harder. I had two main journalism sectors where I had contacts: UK women’s magazines, and the Irish press. Both sectors had just been flooded with new blood, which tends to make commissions scarcer as well as cheaper.
When I got the call sending me back to Cork, I was, bizarrely, on the set of a TV show. Well, not quite a TV show. I was on the set of a ‘proof of concept’ for a pilot for a TV show. The show was trying to take the Queer Eye format but make it about spiritual beliefs. They wanted a wiccan, an astrologer, a tarot reader, and an ‘affirmation’ writer. They called after seeing a video of me telling tarot online. They wanted to try me out as Tarot Spice.
They were nice people, and they meant well, but the whole thing was embarrassing, rigid, and strange. I was in a warehouse in East London with a taxidermied crow and telling a man that he should definitely set up his personal trainer business on camera.
“Love it, Caroline,” a producer said. “We love the accent.” It was a two-day shoot, and I was getting £200 a day to be there. There was enough down-time that I could write and send pitches to editors in between scenes. I had never felt further away from myself: I felt stupid, and cold, and oddly like my Irishness was on display as a kind of personality quirk that could be later mentioned in marketing materials. I didn’t want to be on TV, and I wouldn’t have watched the show even if it was on TV. But I was broke, and this opportunity had fallen in my lap, and so I had to hope it was going to be commissioned.
The call from home came toward the end of the second day. I blurted out to my scene partners: “Someone has cancer,” and then started to laugh. I have one of those nervous laughs that gets giddy whenever something terrible happens. “Do you want to go?” they asked. “Yes,” I said, and left.
The initial days were full of drama, prognoses, Google search results about clinical trials happening in Sweden. Then the heavy, slow, quiet days came. I walked and walked, and eventually seemed to walk myself backwards in time. I can’t drive, and the buses were irregular, so I found myself in the familiar holding pattern of my mid-teens: waiting 15 minutes for a bus to show up to bring me into town, then giving up and walking into town, only for a bus to ride clean past me. I had not done this much aimless bumming around Cork city since my teens, when the glory of going to school in town — Scoil Mhuire, don’t judge me — meant we all had endless hours to spend getting coffees, looking at clothes we couldn’t afford, and generally bothering shop owners.
The shop I bothered the most was Crystal Connection, on the Coal Quay: a two-storey shop that sold crystals, occultist books, incense, and anything you could vaguely describe as ‘alternative’ therapy. I bought my first book of witchcraft there, and desperately followed its instructions for love.
I can still remember some of the spells — take a rose and submerge it in a jar of honey, with a strip of paper bearing your beloved’s name. The spells were always lyrical, but crafty, and oddly soothing to just sit and read. They talked about tying special knots, and the powers of different coloured candles. I bought my first packet of tarot cards there.
It’s still there, only it’s called Dervish now, and I still go there to buy tarot when I’m home, the familiar heavy smell of incense sitting on top of my clothes and lingering on the plane back to Stansted Airport. It was the shop that started me out on a road that ended in East London, in front of a camera with a taxidermied crow.
I started thinking about the shop, and magic shops in general. The peculiar mix of solace and adventure that they offer to teenage girls, trying desperately to find a ‘thing’. I felt an idea starting to form. I started to write.
I went with my mother on a walk down the Marina in Blackrock, that interesting stretch of Cork where the crumbling majesty of Castle Road becomes the more suburban Ballinlough.
Growing up, my two best friends were from either end of this stretch. We seemed to spend so much of our time walking the pathway of the river, repeating urban myths we had heard about river rats, and how they jumped for your throat when cornered. I tacked that onto my idea. The feeling of calm, blue morning light by the Lee in Blackrock, slowly becoming the city centre the more you followed it. I thought about the houses on the Castle Road, and in particular, the one belonging to my friend. I thought it was the most beautiful house in the world: tall and old and full of sounds. I used to call it ‘Batman’s house’, and thought her cosy attic bedroom was the height of romance. She was like Sara Crewe in A Little Princess.
The more I walked and remembered, the more I realised how much I had consciously blocked out. That there was a Cork before the recession, a Cork I had loved very much.
Growing up in a small college town gives you enormous amounts of access and freedom.
You end up hanging out with much older people much sooner. Aged 16, I was taken in by two musicians in their mid twenties: she was the first woman I knew with a shaved head, and he was the first man I knew with a make-up bag. I started playing the bass in their band.
They gave me CDs, and books about feminism, and began to subtly change my concept of gender without me ever realising. I’m still friends with them; they’re in Galway now.
This was the Cork I grew up in: one that could be both grungy and Edwardian, mythical and Catholic. Full of water and clean Atlantic light. I was going to write about that Cork, I decided.
I didn’t call it Cork; I called it Kilbeg. I wanted to blend the old Cork I had grown up in with the new Cork I was falling in love with, and subtly skip out the years of misery in-between.
I wrote 20,000 words, that fortnight in Cork. When I got home, my agent sold it to a publisher in the biggest deal I’ve ever had — and likely, ever will have. I had dug myself out of my financial hole. Sickness still reigned over the family, but I wasn’t scared anymore about not being able to afford visits home or pay my rent. It was one of the worst periods of my life, but it also sharply reminded me of who I was, where I came from, and what stories I wanted to tell. It was a lesson.
It taught me that you can give up on your city, but your city never truly gives up on you.
- All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’Donoghue is published on May 27 by Walker Books
